Five Ways to Boost your Site with Social Media

Broadcast your site’s posts to Twitter, Facebook, and more to connect with customers and attract new ones.

October 21, 2015

Andrea Zoellner

Looking for more traffic? Social media is your best friend. Every Facebook like and retweet helps you grow your audience and attract more customers. To ace your online strategy, optimize your website for social media. From widgets to share buttons, here are five ways to integrate social media into your WordPress.com site.

Social Media Icons

Your website is an important sales tool, but it shouldn’t be the only way you reach and engage customers. If you’re on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest, add Social Media icons to your sidebar or footer where visitors are sure to see them.

There are three ways to add social media icons to your WordPress.com website or blog. First, some themes offer a special custom menu for social media icons. The menu generates icons designed for your theme and are easy to update if your social media accounts change in the future.

Another way is to use Widgets — tools or content that you can add, arrange, and remove from the sidebar(s) of your blog. Select thesocial media icons widgetfrom the Widgets section in your Customizertoconnect the most popular social media networks to your website or blog.

Third, if you have your own social media buttons, you can upload your icons to your media library and use the Text widgetwith a little HTML to control how they display.

For example, The Foodimentary, a blog dedicated to food-related holidays and holiday-related food has added custom social media icons in the widget area of their landing page.

Sharing Buttons

Make it easy to like and share your content by activating sharing buttons at the bottom of your posts and pages.

To customize your blog’s sharing options, go to My Sites → Sharing in the sidebar. You can control the order and look of your social media buttons. You can disable the sharing option and/or like button on specific posts or pages by using the checkbox(s) in the Advanced Settings for a post.

Widgets

Use Widgets to showcase your real-time Twitter timeline, latest Instagram pictures, and other social media activity. Go to Widgets in your Customizer to view, test, and add widgets to your website. Depending on your theme, you may be able to choose where your widget appears on your site. Try different combinations to see what works best.

Recording artist and performer Tae Phoenix used the widget area on her website to embed a Facebook badge, her Twitter Timeline and Instagram photos. Her homepage now features all her social media activity in one central place.

Publicize

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I also like to add the Blog subscription shortcode to the end of each post, but I know some people find shortcode just too frightening. A nice touch would be to have a menu option that allows you to select shortcode from a button in the Visual Editor (rather like you can if you use WordPress.org and download certain plugins). That would save having to go into the Support area if you’ve forgotten the shortcode format you need.

Embedding is adding content to your website that lives on another website. For example, you could embed a YouTube video by copy-pasting the link into your WordPress.com post. The video still lives on YouTube, but your readers can watch it without leaving your website. It’s one step up from simply linking to the video because the video will display and can be played right on your website. You can embed all sorts of things like tweets, Facebook posts, PollDaddy polls, and more. To embed something, often you can just copy-paste the URL into your blog post. You can also usually find the embed code under the share options of that item and copy-paste that code right into your blog post. Here are a few more detailed support articles: https://en.support.wordpress.com/category/embedding-content/

“My Likes” is a great place to keep track of your favorite posts. All you have to do is like it! If you want to keep track of a specific comment made on a post, I suggest saving the unique link to that comment. You can get the link for a comment by clicking on the timestamp next to the author’s name. Where you save the link is up to you, but your web browser is a great place to start. For Internet Explorer, click Favorites in the top menu bar then Add to Favorites. For Chrome and Firefox, click the star in the address bar to bookmark it.